[MUD-Dev] Natural Selection and Communities

[Matt Mihaly]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, John Buehler wrote:
> Matt Mihaly writes:

>> You don't even need to support different types of political
>> structures in your code to allow this to happen. Hell, try
>> STOPPING it from happening!
 
> I'd say that political structures do, in fact, need to be directly
> supported.  Perhaps not in smaller games with more intimate
> atmospheres and more enthusiastic players, but certainly in the
> rather more impersonal and casual-player-based MMORPGs.  The only
> structures that ever evolved in the graphical games that I've seen
> are the ones that the games directly supported.  Asheron's Call
> had monarchies because they were directly supported.  EverQuest
> and Dark Age of Camelot had guilds because they were directly
> supported.

I think you misunderstood what I was driving at, which was that the
cultures of player organizations will evolve differently even using
the same code-supported political systems. In order to end up with
radically different organizational cultures, it's not necessary to
support, say, city-state democracies, AND city-state autocracies AND
city-state oligarchies AND city-state's that are religiously led,
etc. Not that that's not nice (though I wrote an article for
Gamasutra on politics in games a couple years ago and argued that
democracies are the only system that really makes sense to put in a
game) but it's not necessary in order to end up with very different
cultures.

--matt


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